Logistics, Freight and the shortening half-life of Skills. 

The skills and behaviours needed to maintain, develop and decarbonise the Logistics, Transportation and Storage sector are immense. The LSIP team recently convened a Skills Summit to find out more and identify some solutions.  

On Thursday 20^th June 2024, the Logistics, Transportation and Storage Skills Summit took place at East Surrey College. The event welcomed a group of representatives from business, education and the public sector to talk through the skills challenges facing the Logistics, Transportation and Storage sector.  

Francesca Caramelle-Ngoma (Innovation Cluster Programme Manager) and Krithika Ramesh (Senior Project Manager) from Connected Places Catapult gave some insightful, national perspectives into the sector and presented details of the Freight Innovation Fund accelerator programme, which helps accelerate the adoption of commercially ready solutions into the sector. 

Debbie Reeds, Employer Engagement Lead from Surrey Choices, led a discussion on ways to make the sector workforce more inclusive. She reflected that although there are some issues around inclusive recruitment practices – due to the turbulent, reactive nature of the sector – perhaps there should be opportunities to invest more time in exploring and identifying more creative solutions. Our dedicated page, Supporting businesses to access “hidden” local talent, provides further details on this. 

Ben Snellock, Project Manager & Interim Distance Learning Manager at Nescot, cited some research highlighted by IBM, indicating that the half-life of skills (i.e. the time taken for a skill to remain relevant and valuable) has shrunk to just five years; less than three for technical skills! This has significant implications for employers, and attendees discussed different ways to work with providers to ensure the current (and future) workforce is able to upskill to allow employees to maintain specialised skillsets. 

Within Logistics, it was recognised there remains a lot to be done to make the sector more sustainable so Green Skills are a particular area of focus. 

Linked to this, Nick Allen, Co-Founder & CEO at Low Carbon Impact, invited discussion about making logistics more sustainable and identifying the challenges. In what was an informative discussion on the key levers for decarbonisation, access to affordable solutions, charging infrastructure for electric (and indeed hydrogen) vehicles and the importance of operational efficiency as an early decarbonisation lever were spoken about in detail. 

Thank you for pulling together such an insightful event – both Krithika and I left with ideas and feeling very energised. During the session we looked at opportunities and novel mechanisms to make this sector more inclusive and diverse, while considering the needs and wants of current generations – a call to action that I would like to extent to everyone within the sector. One the objectives of the freight innovation cluster is to encourage accessibility, diversity, inclusion in this industry which is why we appreciated being involved and we look forward to working more closely in the future too to generate change and open doors.” – Francesca Caramelle-Ngoma, Connected Places Catapult.

Employer events are invaluable to the local economy to support the workforce in the area. Every business is unique and therefore their needs and wants are also unique. Being able to speak with employers and actually find out what they need in their business, means we, as a College, can continue to shape the curriculum to suit the employment market. This is not only beneficial to the students, but the businesses get what they need in an employer. This supports their pipeline growth in recruitment and benefits them in the long term.” – Michelle Perkins, East Surrey College.

If you would like further details on any of the above, please contact the team: lsip@surrey-chambers.co.uk